Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

The little girl is just beautiful ~ the wind blowing her dress and her little striped socks. Mom standing behind her looks lovely, too. I hope she had a good life and was happy. I don't know why this makes me so sad, though. Wish I knew more about her.

My grandmother talked about a "slabtown" that opened near a mine in rural Virginia. It was called "slabtown" because it was built out of slabs, the cheapest kind of lumber that came from the sawmill, and its residents were prostitutes.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.